Wylie was looking away from her, at the door.
“Light can be both particle and wave,” she said to me. “Did you know that?”
I couldn’t get enough of looking at her. I was fascinated by her conviction, her craziness, her aging, manicured beauty, and I wanted to hear what she would say next. She could have been a performance-art piece, a portrait of a madwoman in an attic of fashion magazines; yet she wasn’t acting. I could have stayed there all day, and I probably would have if Wylie hadn’t physically dragged me — exerting a surprisingly strong grip around my shoulders — from the house.
On the sidewalk, in the painful, brilliant sun, Wylie punched the air and said, “Why did you show me that? Why?”
“Because,” I said, “there’s nobody else to show.”
Fourteen
At midnight, there were more people in Wylie’s apartment than I’d seen since that first, partylike meeting, and the same atmosphere was building. Some people were drunk or at least tipsy, and Berto greeted me with an uncharacteristic hug, his breath sweet with beer. From what he and Stan said, I knew Angus had been out drinking with them, but it didn’t show. His posture was as straight as ever, and when I came in, alone— after our little excursion, I’d gone back to my mother’s and Wylie had taken off somewhere on foot — he only winked. I sat down on the sleeping bags next to Sledge, who was gazing balefully around the room.
There were at least ten people I didn’t recognize, all wearing hiking clothes; some had clipboards and milled around with what looked to me like a false air of efficiency. One of them cornered Wylie, just as a young woman with a long braid and a red T-shirt sat down next to me, smiling brightly.
“I haven’t seen you before,” she said. “Would you like to be on our mailing list?”
I looked at her. “Um, I’m just Wylie’s sister,” I said. She nodded, still beaming, and held out her hand.
“I’m Panther,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m the media coordinator. Would you like to sign our petition?”
“Sure,” I said. I scribbled my name without even bothering to read the sheet, distracted by Wylie, whose quiet conversation had turned into an argument.
“We’ve put a lot of work into this,” he was saying, “and you won’t even listen to my position paper?”
“Because that’s not how you deal with the media,” the other guy said, exasperated. “Because there are proven ways to conduct effective activism. Because antics like draining pools detract from those of us making real change.”
Wylie got right in his face, the toad-killer look back in his eyes.
“What do you call real? Sitting in a tree again? Helping suburban moms master recycling techniques? Giving inspirational talks to schoolchildren about saving the cute little animals of the forest?”
“Damn,” Panther said quietly, next to me.
“Nothing ever changes. Go sell some more greeting cards.”
“Those were postcards,” the other guy said, “and they raised money for overhead.”
“Get out of here,” Wylie said.
Stan and Berto were staring at the ground. Angus was watching, avidly and without distress, as if it were a gripping scene from a movie. Irina, standing in the bedroom doorway with Psyche in the ever-present sling, went over to Wylie and touched his arm. It was the first time I noticed the way she looked at him — as if he were a hero whose most sterling qualities she alone appreciated. She stood on tiptoe to whisper something in his ear, and he shook his head and folded his skinny arms.
“Let’s go,” the other guy said. “This is bullshit.”
“But you were supposed to help us with the media, man,” Berto said.
“Wylie doesn’t think you need any help,” he said. All the strangers filed out behind him, with their clipboards and backpacks and water bottles, and some of them, I noticed, looked like they regretted leaving the party.
When they were gone Wylie pulled a folded piece of paper out of the back pocket of his dirty jeans. “I’ve written our position paper,” he said very quietly.
“Go ahead,” Angus said.
Wylie read like a kid giving a book report, forgetting to pause at commas and periods, assuming he’d used any to begin with. “We are creating a wilderness refuge. What is the nature of a wilderness refuge? We think of it as a place where animals are guaranteed a livable habitat, but this guarantee is all too limited in scope. It is the habitat itself that requires a refuge from the constantly encroaching structures of civilization. We must develop a form of resistance to these structures. We must be willing to imagine an alternate world.” As he read, I closed my eyes and remembered those middle-of-the-night e-mails; their tone seemed different to me now, less ranting than lonely. I bet he wished I were still in New York, the conveniently silent recipient of his ideas.
“Do we save wilderness so that humans can enjoy it, aesthetically or otherwise? This way of thinking leads to shallow, insincere, and manipulative forms of conservation. Trees left uncut by the highway while behind them denuded, clear-cut land extends for miles. Farmed salmon dyed pink to mimic the flesh of wild fish that have been harvested to extinction. These pretenses allow us to believe that we are not destroying the world in which we live. But we do not save wilderness for our own sakes; we save it for its own. Because ethics are real, and once they are acknowledged they must be pursued to their logical ends.”
I listened carefully to this speech. Earlier in the summer I’d seen Wylie and the rest as operating under the sway of irrational passions, but by now my feelings had changed. I even understood their dissatisfaction with the larger group. They were after something bigger than greeting cards and media coordination. Most activism seems crazy at the beginning; any position that imagines changing the status quo contains an element of the fantastic. I thought of what Irina had said, the first night I’d met her: “Just people who want to be living differently.”
“Ordinarily such an act of creation has been the province of the federal government but we see no reason why this power should be held in the hands of civil servants rather than ordinary and enlightened citizens. We see no reason why ‘refuge’ should be a bureaucratic label rather than a political act. Therefore as of today we are making the mountains into a wilderness refuge. The place itself is a refugee from humans; the place itself, not one endangered species or tree or habitat. The fact that this act will be temporary makes it no less meaningful. The wilderness needs a refuge.”
Heads bowed, coughing slightly, we waited to see if this was in fact the end of the paper.
“That’s it,” Wylie muttered.
Irina clapped madly and everyone else joined in, making Wylie blush. Blushing was epidemic among this crowd. The saying “his heart is in the right place” ran through my mind, as if I could picture it, visible through his chest, his young, still-beating heart.
Stan and Berto took off on bicycles, their muscled legs pumping. Wylie got the keys from me and drove the Caprice with Angus next to him up front and me and Irina in the back, with Psyche in the sling murmuring commentary. “Guala guala,” she said to the window. I spoke her name, and she turned to me and said the same thing. She had some kind of rash across her face, but it didn’t seem to bother her. Angus kept looking back over his freckled shoulder to check on me and smile, which I found nice at first and then kind of annoying. After a while I stared out the window at the rows of subdivisions, the bright hulks of shopping malls and cineplexes, the great arcs of overpasses. As we approached one, I saw two shadows moving beneath a light up there, a movement that for a second resolved itself: teenage boys staring down at traffic, holding rocks in their hands.